CHI Community Research Articles

Conducting Research at the Intersection of HCI and Health: Building and Supporting Teams with Diverse Expertise to Increase Public Health Impact.

Research at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and health is increasingly done by collaborative cross-disciplinary teams. The need for cross-disciplinary teams arises from the interdisciplinary nature of the work itself-with the need for expertise in a health discipline, experimental design, statistics, and computer science, in addition to HCI. This work can also increase innovation, transfer of knowledge across fields, and have a higher impact on communities. To succeed at a collaborative project, researchers must effectively form and maintain a team that has the right expertise, integrate research perspectives and work practices, align individual and team goals, and secure funding to support the research. However, successfully operating as a team has been challenging for HCI researchers, and can be limited due to a lack of training, shared vocabularies, lack of institutional incentives, support from funding agencies, and more; which significantly inhibits their impact. This workshop aims to draw on the wealth of individual experiences in health project team collaboration across the CHI community and beyond. By bringing together different stakeholders involved in HCI health research, together, we will identify needs experienced during interdisciplinary HCI and health collaborations. We will identify existing practices and success stories for supporting team collaboration and increasing HCI capacity in health research. We aim for participants to leave our workshop with a toolbox of methods to tackle future team challenges, a community of peers who can strive for more effective teamwork, and feeling positioned to make the health impact they wish to see through their work.

From Awareness to Action: Exploring End-User Empowerment Interventions for Dark Patterns in UX

The study of UX dark patterns, i.e., UI designs that seek to manipulate user behaviors, often for the benefit of online services, has drawn significant attention in the CHI and CSCW communities in recent years. To complement previous studies in addressing dark patterns from (1) the designer's perspective on education and advocacy for ethical designs; and (2) the policymaker's perspective on new regulations, we propose an end-user-empowerment intervention approach that helps users (1) raise the awareness of dark patterns and understand their underlying design intents; (2) take actions to counter the effects of dark patterns using a web augmentation approach. Through a two-phase co-design study, including 5 co-design workshops (N=12) and a 2-week technology probe study (N=15), we reported findings on the understanding of users' needs, preferences, and challenges in handling dark patterns and investigated the feedback and reactions to users' awareness of and action on dark patterns being empowered in a realistic in-situ setting.

The Transformative Effect of the Psi Chi Community

The Transformative Effect of the Psi Chi Community

From Collaborative Habituation to Everyday Togetherness: A Long-Term Study of Use of the Messaging Kettle

We present a long-term study of use of the Messaging Kettle, an Internet of Things (IOT) research prototype that augments an everyday kettle with both sensing and messaging capability and a beautiful light display in order to investigate connecting geographically distant loved ones to their family through the routine of boiling the kettle. Connection at a distance has been of sustained interest to the CHI community, and the social connection of older people is of increasing importance in recognition of ageing populations globally. However, very few novel designs in this domain have been investigated in situ or over the long term to examine whether their use sustains, and if so, how they impact communication in a relationship. The Messaging Kettle was trialled with four pairs of dispersed older mothers and adult daughters over timeframes that lasted between two months to more than two years. We observed the phenomenon ofcollaborative habituationwherein each party creatively made the technology work for them both through a combination of the gradual transformation of their everyday practices, arrangements, and living. Through developing these joint practices over time, participants expressed feelings ofeveryday togethernessthat nurture their relationship at a distance. Three of the four couples continued to use the prototype for years, beyond the initial trial. We reflect on the artful integration of features of the Messaging Kettle and the way in which these features supportedcollaborative habituation. We also reflect on lessons and implications for the design of such relational technologies.

Demo hour

Interactivity is a unique forum of the ACM CHI conference that showcases more than 50 cutting-edge demonstrations and inspirational interactive installations from the diverse group of researchers, designers, and artists that make up the CHI community. These works were chosen to engage audiences intellectually, imaginatively, and physically to create a critical discourse for the future of HCI. Julie R. Williamson, Amanda M. Williams, Sean White, and Cesar Torres, CHI 2016 Interactivity Chairs

Demo hour

Interactivity is a unique forum of the ACM CHI Conference that showcases hands-on demonstrations, novel interactive technologies, and artistic installations. At CHI 2015 in Seoul we hosted more than 30 exhibits, including an invited digital interactive art exhibit. Interactivity highlights the diverse group of computer scientists, sociologists, designers, psychologists, artists, and many more who make up the CHI community. Julie R. Williamson and Juhyun Eune, CHI 2015 Interactivity Chairs

Demo hour

Interactivity is a unique forum of the ACM CHI Conference that showcases hands-on demonstrations, novel interactive technologies, and artistic installations. At CHI 2014, we aimed to create a "one of a CHInd" Interactivity experience with more than 60 interactive exhibits to highlight the diverse group of computer scientists, sociologists, designers, psychologists, artists, and many more that make up the CHI community. Julie Rico Williamson and Steven Benford, CHI Interactivity Chairs

P02.158. Tai Chi community program is effective in reducing elderly fall-related hospital utilization: a prospective observational study

Purpose Overseas studies and reviews showed that about 30% of elderly suffer from falls every year and approximately one fall in ten resulted in fractures. Fall is a major cause of hospitalization in Hong Kong, ranking the fifth in terms of total bed days of all public acute hospitals. Tai Chi (TC) is a Chinese martial art form for centuries and seems to be an effective intervention to prevent falls through improving functional balance and physical response. Methods A prospective observational study of 3,222 communitydwelling elderly aged 60 or above was conducted to assess the effect of TC in reducing injurious falls incidence. Participants were community-dwelling elderly aged 60 or above with “Timed Up-and-Go” test (TUGT) less than or equal to 20 seconds. An hour simplified TC session led by recognized TC coaches was performed twice a week in a period of four weeks. Participants were encouraged to practice TC after training. Injurious fall incidents were retrieved and compared from a medical records database 12 months before and after TC training between 2 strata: continue (n=1,269) vs cease (n=1,360) TC in 12 months post training. Results The injurious fall rate dropped from 2.21% (pre) to 1.34% (post) in the continuing TC group while the fall rate increased from 2.06% (pre) to 3.46% (post) in the noncontinuing TC group. The percentage of hospitalization due to fall-related injuries was 0.39% and 1.03% in the continuing and non-continuing TC groups, respectively. Conclusion Study results demonstrate that TC has a potential preventive effect on injurious falls and hospital utilization.

Why the CHI community should be involved in standards

Public policy increasingly plays a role in influencing the work that we do as HCI researchers, interaction designers, and practitioners. "Public policy" is a broad term that includes both government policy and policy within non-governmental organizations, such as standards bodies. The Interacting with Public Policy forum focuses on topics at the intersection of human-computer interaction and public policy. Jonathan Lazar, Editor

The cloud

The forum title "Sustainably Ours" was chosen to suggest two things about sustainability. First, sustainability is collectively ours---it is an issue of collective global fate accumulated from individual and sovereign actions. Second, our CHI community is especially responsible for certain issues of and approaches to sustainability---how interactivity is implicated in material effects, behavioral change, changing sociopolitical contexts of design, and mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Eli Blevis, Editor | <mail>eblevis@indiana.edu</mail>

User-experience planning for corporate success

Good news for the CHI community: Behind the scenes, corporations are re-organizing to achieve user-centered products and services.

Domestic design: An introduction to the research issues surrounding the development and design of interactive technologies for the home

Research issues surrounding the development and design of interactive technologies for home are discussed in the Special Issue of Personal Technologies. Liechti and Ichikawa's paper provides an overview of the mainstream literature on computer mediated communications (CMC), literature which derives mainly from the CHI and CSCW communities. It also reports on an instantiation of the kind of multimedia applications that would seem a logical output from that literature. Rose and Kroff offer an analysis of how the logic of the same sort can be applied to hitherto noninteractive technology in home settings, namely music reproduction. Here they show how innovative interfaces can allow much. Hughes and co-researchers consider the problem of how to describe home environments. They worry about how to do service to the richness of domestic life while at the same time providing sufficient abstraction to allow design thinking.

Network Communities: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed ...

Collaboration has long been of considerable interest to both designers and researchers in the CHI and CSCW communities. This paper contributes to this discussion by proposing the concept of network communities as a new genre of collaboration for this discussion. Network communities are robust and persistent communities based on a sense of locality that spans both the virtual and physical worlds of their users. They are a technosocial construct that requires understanding of both the technology and the sociality embodying them. We consider several familiar systems as well as historical antecedents to describe the affordances these systems offer their community of users. Based on our own experience as designers, users and researchers of a variety of network communities, we extend this initial design space along three dimensions: the boundary negotiations between real and virtual worlds, support for social rhythms and the emergence and development of community. Finally we offer implications for designers, researchers and community members based on our findings.

Field oriented design techniques

This workshop, held at CHI 95, focused on field research methods that allow us to incorporate a holistic understanding of users and their work and its context into the design process at the earliest stages. Although these techniques hold great promise and have attracted attention and interest in the CHI community, they have not been widely adopted or systematically discussed in the published literature. This workshop was developed to address this deficiency. We were fortunate in receiving a large set of position papers in response to our call for participation; we accepted 12 of about 20 papers submitted (and we both had a case to contribute, for a total of 14 cases).We planned the workshop activities to allow for maximum interaction among the participants. So that we could all arrive already acquainted with each others' studies, we circulated the participants' position papers ahead of time. Our goals for the day-and-a-half workshop (extended by popular demand to include working lunches and extra time on the second day) were to develop a common understanding of the work done in each of the studies, to map the work done in each study to the stages of the design process where it fit best or had the greatest impact, and to come away with a systematic model of the terminology, methodology, and effectiveness of field research as represented in this set of cases. These goals were naturally larger than we could achieve in the short time allotted us, but the enthusiasm and dedication of the group has enabled us to continue to work on them since CHI 95 and will yield a published collection of case studies and essays this Fall.

The CHI '95 doctoral consortium

For the past 10 years, SIGCHI has sponsored a Doctoral Consortium which is held at the annual CHI conference. Traditionally, the Doctoral Consortium has been a closed event in which an invited group of doctoral candidates present their research-in-progress to each other and to a faculty committee. In addition to the presentations, there are typically group exercises and discussion sessions which are designed to allow the Doctoral Consortium participants to get to know one another better, to think about their research in the larger context of the CHI field, and to become more fully integrated citizens of the CHI community. Participants in the Doctoral Consortium also are encouraged to participate in the CHI conference poster event.The CHI '95 Doctoral Consortium, held May 7-8 in Denver, Colorado, followed the traditional format described above. However, in keeping with the approach of continuous innovation and iterative design which is ingrained in the CHI conference planning process, the students and faculty who participated in this year's event also thought about ways to improve upon that format. The main opportunity we see for the future is to create more of a link between the Doctoral Consortium and the main conference. The sections below will report on both the key events of this year's Doctoral Consortium and on the ideas we have for the future.

Advances derived from real-world experiences

The INTERCHI workshop titled "Human-Computer Interaction Advances Derived from Real-World Experiences" began as a discussion of personal experiences in doing HCI (human-computer interaction) work in real-world settings. It concluded with discussion of some of the "tricks of the trade" for applying HCI in the real world and with suggestions for using the CHI and INTERACT conferences as vehicles of change for prompting more real-world applications, of HCI. The latter set of suggestions, we present as challenges to the INTERCHI and CHI communities.

Standards factor

It now appears that the first three parts of the 17-part ISO 9241 standard, Visual display terminals used for office tasks - Ergonomic requirements , have successfully completed the entire ISO standards-development and approval process. Parts 1, 2, and 3 are entitled Introduction, Task requirements, and Visual display requirements , respectively. Several of the outcomes of their approval should be of interest to the CHI community because they may foretell events that will follow approval of Parts 10--17, which address software ergonomics:• TUV Rheinland, the German national certification body, has begun to certify products for compliance with Part 3.• ANSI is investigating the procedure for becoming a national certification body.• The United Kingdom and Sweden are moving towards implementing the approved parts of 9241.• Parts 1, 2, and 3 have recently been adopted as CEN standards by the member nations of the European Community.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE ON COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK (CSCW)

As it grows, the SIGCHI community spawns new technical areas. Although SIGCHI itself is a relative youngster, it has already seen the Hypertext, UIST and CSCW conferences come into being as offshoots of CHI. This issue of the SIGCHI Bulletin is devoted to the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work. The CSCW field has grown so quickly that it is experiencing the same problems the early CHI community faced. These include (1) widely scattered literature that is difficult to find, (2) different conflicting paradigms for approaching the CSCW subject area, (3) multiple approaches for building and studying groupware systems but no framework for how or where to use them, and (4) a lack of integration of the new CSCW approaches with current technology.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE ON VIDEO AS A RESEARCH AND DESIGN TOOL

It is our pleasure to present the following collection of papers about the use of video as a tool for research and design. As costs drop and both video and computers become more prevalent, people are finding new uses for video to support their work. Yet most video work in the CHI community has been done in isolation. Video users have not had a forum in which to present, share, or learn from each other's work. No books are available nor are there courses that teach about the effective use of video in human-computer interaction research or design.

THE STANDARDS FACTOR

The Status of the HFS HCI Standards Committee is reported on in a separate article by Paul Reed of AT&T Bell Laboratories, the vice-chair of that committee. It describes the background, status and approach being followed by that committee in its attempt to develop meaningful standards for user interfaces and the development of user interfaces. We appreciate the effort Paul has made to keep the CHI community informed and look forward to additional status reports.